Barbórka* (collages), 2020, commissioned work for Silesian Museum in Katowice

A series of 50 collages based on photographs from the archives of the Silesian Museum (including the series „Black Diamonds” by Max Steckel).

Archival photos from the early days of mining in Silesia were combined with new photographs of defunct Silesian mines, archival and contemporary photos of glaciers, as well as drawings and photos from old books on botany, biology, and geology. They combine various periods and histories: of local communities, ancient Carboniferous forests, great horsetails and club mosses, and contemporary endangered ecosystems. For all of them, a given moment is decisive for the continuation of the local community and its interspecies, transgeological, deep connections. Here, deep-history and the eras of human and non-human beings merge with each other creating a complex, closed cycle between two distant epochs of the great extinction of species intertwined in the process of mining and burning coal.

* Barbórka, 4 December, St. Barbara’s Day — the patron saint of miners